What is unique about the concept of a poem without a hero? Deciphering “Poem without a Hero” as a prophecy. Sergey Vasilievich Shervinsky
Part I
Thirteenth year
(1913)
Di rider finirai
Pria dell' aurora.
Don Giovanni*
“There’s still a song or grief inside me
The last winter before the war"
"White Flock"
_________________________________
*You'll stop laughing
Before dawn comes.
Don Juan (it.).
INTRODUCTION
From the year forty,
It’s like I’m looking at everything from a tower.
It's like I'm saying goodbye again
With what I said goodbye to long ago,
As if she crossed herself
And I go under the dark arches.
DEDICATION
And since I didn't have enough paper
I am writing on your draft.
And now someone else's word appears
And like a snowflake on my hand,
It melts trustingly and without reproach.
And the dark eyelashes of Antinous
Suddenly they rose, and there was green smoke,
And the breeze blew to the family...
Isn't it the sea? - No, it's just pine needles
Grave and in the scum of foam
Closer, closer... “Marche funebre”...*
Chopin
"In my hot youth -
when George the Third was King..."
Byron. *
____________________
* In my ardent youth -
When George the Third was king...
Byron (English).
I lit the treasured candles
And together with those who did not come to me
I'm celebrating the forty-first year,
But the Lord's strength is with us,
The flame drowned in the crystal
And the wine burns like poison...
These are bursts of creepy conversation,
When all the delusions are resurrected,
And the clock still doesn't chime...
There is no measure of my anxiety,
I, like a shadow, stand on the threshold
I guard the last comfort.
And I hear a long bell,
And I feel cold and wet.
I'm cold, I'm freezing, I'm burning
And, as if remembering something,
Turning half a turn
I say in a quiet voice:
You're wrong: Venice of the Doges
It's nearby. But the masks are in the hallway
And cloaks, and wands, and crowns
You will have to leave today.
I decided to glorify you today,
New Year's tomboys.
This Faust, that Don Juan...
And someone else with a tympanum
Dragged the goat-footed one.
And the walls opened up for them,
Sirens wailed in the distance
And, like a dome, the ceiling swelled.
Everything is clear: not to me, so to whom?!
Dinner was not prepared here for them.
And they were not the ones who were going to be forgiven.
Chrome is the last one, coughs dryly.
I hope the evil spirit
You didn't dare enter here.
I forgot your lessons
Evil talkers and false prophets,
But you haven't forgotten me.
How the future matures in the past,
So in the future the past smolders
A terrible festival of dead leaves.
Only... I was afraid of the mummers.
For some reason it always seemed to me
That some extra shadow
Among them without a face or name
I got stuck in. Let's open the meeting
On New Year's Day.
That midnight Hoffmannian
I won’t spread it around the world,
And I would ask others... Wait,
It's like you're not on the list
In capuchins, clowns, lysiskas -
The mile is dressed in stripes,
Painted motley and roughly -
You are the same age as the Mamre oak,
The age-old interlocutor of the moon.
Fake moans will not deceive:
You write iron laws, -
Hamurabi, Lycurgus, Solons
We should learn from you.
This creature is of a strange disposition,
He doesn't wait for gout and fame
They sat him down in a hurry
In the anniversary lush armchairs,
And carries along the blooming heather,
The deserts have their own celebration.
And I’m not guilty of anything, not even this,
Neither in another, nor in a third. To the poets
Sins didn’t stick at all.
Dance in front of the Ark of the Covenant,
Or perish... whatever! about it
Poems told them better.
Shout: “Hero to the forefront!”
Don't worry, the big one will be replaced
Definitely coming out now...
So are you all running away together?
As if everyone had found a bride,
Leaving eye to eye
Me in the dark with this frame,
From which the same one looks
An hour still unmourned.
It all doesn’t come at once.
Like one musical phrase,
I hear several confused words.
After... flat step stairs,
A flash of gas and in the distance
A clear voice: “I am ready to die.”
You are more voluptuous, you are more physical
Alive, brilliant shadow.
Baratynsky
The satin coat opened...
Don't be angry with me, my dear
I will not punish you, but myself.
You see, there, behind the grainy blizzard,
Theater Blacks
They're starting a fuss again.
How the runners jingle ceremoniously
And the goat's cavity drags.
Pass by, shadows! He's there alone.
On the wall is his thin profile -
Gabriel, or Mephistopheles
Yours, beauty, paladin?
You ran away from the portrait to me,
And the empty frame until the light
It will be waiting for you on the wall -
So dance alone without a partner.
I am the role of the ancient choir
I agree to accept...
You came to Russia from nowhere,
Oh my blond miracle
Columbine of the tenth years!
Why do you look so dimly and vigilantly? —
St. Petersburg doll, actor,
You are one of my doubles.
In addition to other titles, this one is necessary
Attribute. O friend of poets!
I am the heir to your glory.
Here to the music of the wondrous master,
Leningrad wild wind
I see the dance of the court bones,
Wedding candles are floating,
Kissing shoulders under the veil,
The temple thunders: “Dove, come!..”
Mountains of Parma violets in April
And a meeting in the Maltese Chapel,
Like poison in your chest.
The house of the colorful comedy truck,
Peeling cupids
They guard the altar of Venus.
You cleaned the bedroom like a gazebo.
The village girl-neighbor -
The cheerful squire does not recognize.
And golden candlesticks,
And on the azure walls there are saints -
This good is half stolen.
All in flowers, like Botticelli's "Spring"
You received friends in bed,
And Pierrot, the duty officer, was languishing.
I haven't seen your husband
I, the cold clinging to the glass
Or the striking of the fortress clock.
Don't be afraid, I don't sword at home,
Come out to meet me boldly, -
Your horoscope has long been ready.
“Bryansk are falling, Mantashev is growing.
The young man is no longer there, ours is no longer.”
Velimir Khlebnikov
Christmastide was warmed by fires.
And the carriages fell off the bridges,
And the whole mourning city floated
For an unknown purpose
Along the Neva, or against the current, -
Just away from your graves.
In Letny the weather vane sang subtly
And the silver moon is bright
It was freezing over the Silver Age.
And always in frosty silence,
Pre-war, prodigal and menacing,
There was a hidden hum.
But then he was heard dully,
He barely touched his hearing
And drowned in the snowdrifts of the Nevsky
Who wanders under the windows after midnight,
Who does it mercilessly target?
Dim beam corner lamp -
He saw how the slender mask
On the way back from Damascus
She did not return home alone.
There's already a smell of perfume on the stairs,
And a hussar cornet with poetry
And with senseless death in my chest
He will call if he has the courage,
He is for you, he is for his La Traviata,
I came to bow. Look.
Not in the damned Masurian swamps.
Not on the blue Carpathian heights...
He's on your doorstep...
Across..,
May God forgive you!
It's me - your old conscience -
I found the burned story
And on the edge of the windowsill
In the dead man's house
She put it down and tiptoed away.
AFTERWORD
Everything is fine; there lies a poem
And, as is typical for her, she remains silent.
Well, what if the topic breaks out,
Will he knock on the window with his fist?
And to this call from afar
Suddenly a terrible sound responds
Bubbling, groaning and screaming...
And the vision of crossed arms.
Part II
TAILS
(Intermezzo)
V.G.Garshin
“I drink the water of Lethe...
The doctor has forbidden me to be sad."
Pushkin
My editor was unhappy
He swore to me that he was busy and sick,
I have classified my phone...
How is it possible! three topics at once!
After reading the last sentence,
You can't figure out who's in love with whom.
At first I gave up. But again
Word after word fell out,
The music box rattled.
And over that filled bottle,
With a straight and green tongue,
A poison unknown to me was burning.
And in the dream everything seemed to be
I'm writing a libretto for someone,
And there is no end to music.
But sleep is also a little thing!
"Soft embalmer"*, Blue Bird. /* "The Gentle Comforter" from John's poem
Keats "Ode to Sleep"
Elsinore terraces parapet.
And I myself was not happy,
This hellish harlequinade
Hearing a howl from afar.
I kept hoping that it would pass
It will fly by like flakes of smoke,
Through the mysterious twilight of pine needles.
Don't fight off the motley junk!
This is the old weirdo Cagliostro
For my dislike for him.
And bats flash
And hunchbacks run across the roof,
And the gypsy girl licks blood.
Roman carnival midnight
And it doesn’t smell, - the chant of the Cherubimskaya
It's shaking outside the high window.
Nobody knocks on my door,
Only a mirror dreams of a mirror,
Silence guards silence.
But there was that theme for me,
Like a crushed chrysanthemum
On the floor when the coffin is carried.
Between remember and remember, friends,
Distance as from Luga
To the country of satin bouts.
The demon got me into rummaging through my hair...
Well, it can still happen
That everything is my fault.
I am the quietest, I am the simple one,
— “Plantain”, “White Flock” —
Make excuses? But how, friends!?
Just know: they will accuse you of plagiarism...
Am I more to blame than others?..
True, this is the last time...
I accept failure
And I don’t hide my embarrassment
Under a secluded gas mask.
That hundred-year-old enchantress
Suddenly woke up and had fun
I wanted it. I have nothing to do with it.
Lace drops his handkerchief,
He squints languidly over the lines
And Bryullov’s shoulder beckons.
I drank every drop of it
And, with demonic black thirst
Obsessed, didn't know how
I have to deal with the demoniac.
I threatened her with the star chamber
And drove her to her own attic,
In the darkness, under the Manfreds they ate,
And to the shore where Shelley is dead
Looking straight into the sky, I lay there,
And all the larks around the world
Torn the abyss of the ether
And Georg held the torch,
But she insisted stubbornly:
"I'm not that English lady
And not Clara Gazul at all,
I have no pedigree at all,
Except sunny and fabulous.
And July himself brought me.”
And your ambiguous glory,
Lying in a ditch for twenty years,
I won’t serve like that yet;
You and I will still feast
And I with my royal kiss
I will reward you at evil midnight.
1941. January (3-5th in the afternoon)
Leningrad.
Fountain House.
Rewritten in Tashkent
19 Jan 1942 (at night during
mild earthquake).
EPILOGUE
To the city and to the friend
So under the roof of the Fountain House,
Where the evening languor wanders
With a lantern and a bunch of keys, -
I echoed with a distant echo
Inappropriately disturbing laughter
The endless sleep of things, -
Where is the witness of everything in the world,
At sunset and at dawn
An old maple tree is looking into the room,
And, anticipating our separation,
I want a withered black hand,
How he is reaching out for help.
…………..
And the ground was burning underfoot
And such a star looked
To my not yet abandoned house,
And I was waiting for the conventional sound...
It's somewhere there - near Tobruk,
It's somewhere here - around the corner.
You are my formidable and my last,
Bright listener of dark nonsense:
Hope, forgiveness, honor.
Before me you burn like a flame,
You stand above me like a banner
And you kiss me like flattery.
Place your hand on my head.
Let time stop now
This watch is on you.
Misfortune will not escape us
And the cuckoo won't cuckoo
In our scorched forests.
And not becoming my grave
You are granite
He turned pale, died, became silent.
Our separation is imaginary,
I'm inseparable from you
My shadow is on your walls
My reflection in the canals,
The sound of footsteps in the Hermitage halls
And on the echoing arches of bridges,
And on the old Volkovo Field,
Where can I cry in freedom?
In the thicket of your new crosses.
I thought you were chasing me
Are you left there to die?
In the shine of spiers in the reflection of waters.
I did not wait for the desired messengers,
Above you are only your beauties
White Nights round dance.
And the funny word is home
Nobody knows now
Everyone is looking into someone else's window
Some in Tashkent, some in New York
And the air of exile is bitter,
Like poisoned wine.
We could all admire me,
When in the belly of a flying fish
I escaped from the evil chase
And over Ladoga and over the forest,
Like she's possessed by a demon
Like the night rushed towards Brocken.
And behind me, sparkling with mystery
And calling herself the Seventh
She rushed to an unheard-of feast
Pretending to be a music notebook
Famous Leningradka
She returned to her native air.
Analysis of Akhmatova’s “Poem without a Hero”
The poem “Poem without a Hero” is one of Akhmatova’s most significant works. It has been in the making for many years. Akhmatova continued to work on “Poem…” until the end of her life.
The work has a very complex structure. It consists of three main parts. This is indicated by the author's title of the fourth edition: “A poem without a hero. Triptych. 1940-1965". In fact, “Poem…” includes a large number of themes, overlapping and echoing each other.
The main text is preceded by three author's dedications. The first part is called “Nine hundred and thirteenth year.” It refers the reader to the era of the poetess’s youth, when Russia and the whole world were on the eve of a global catastrophe. In the “Introduction” Akhmatova directly states: “from the year 1940... I look at everything.” During this time, she has accumulated vast life experience and is able to impartially assess all the changes that have occurred to her and to the country. It is no coincidence that two historical points were chosen, each of which was followed by world wars.
The epigraphs to the first chapter, which are excerpts from classical examples of Russian poetry, create the necessary atmosphere of a distant era. In Akhmatova’s imagination, a kind of carnival (arliquinada) of mysterious masks and figures appears. The main character takes part in this action, but she herself remains a mystery. The poetess claimed that her heroine has no real prototype. It is rather a “portrait of the era” of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg. Nevertheless, in “The Petersburg Tale”, through mysterious and encrypted hints, the real story of unrequited love and suicide of a young poet (V. Knyazev and O. Sudeikin) emerges. This tragic story unfolds against the backdrop of a masquerade; it is a reflection of the poetess’s emotional experiences.
From fantastic pictures of old Petersburg, Akhmatova moves on to the harsh 20s and terrible 30s. The second part of the poem (“Tails”) describes the coming “Twentieth Century” and the irreversible changes that occurred in Russia. The poetess notes bitterly: “it doesn’t even smell like carnival midnight.” The work loses its narrative elements and becomes an expression of personal pain and despair. Many passages in the second part were cut out by censors. Akhmatova frankly reflects on that terrible time of “unmemorable fear.”
In the third part (“Epilogue”), Akhmatova addresses her hometown, which is under siege (June 1942). The poetess was forced to evacuate to Tashkent, but distance had no power over her soul. All Akhmatova’s thoughts are directed to St. Petersburg. In the finale, two historical eras merge into a single image of the great City, with which the fate of the poetess is forever connected.
Akhmatova dedicated the poem to all Leningraders who died during the Nazi blockade of the city.
The final solutions in thinking about her time, about the world and the person in it were found by Akhmatova in “A Poem without a Hero,” which for its author became the result of a life in poetry. The plot basis of its first part, the “St. Petersburg story” “Nine Hundred and Thirteen,” was a true life drama: unable to withstand the betrayal of the woman he idolized, the famous actress, charming and fickle O. A. Glebova-Sudeikina, a 22-year-old man in love with her shot himself. summer poet and hussar Be. Knyazev.
A completely trivial love drama, if not for its tragic outcome. But Akhmatova had no desire to write out her interesting ups and downs for any of her readers. She was struck by the deep - symbolic - meaning of what happened, as if a bright spotlight illuminated the essential features of the era. And the names mentioned above never appear in the poem: the place of real people is taken by traditional characters of a theatrical masquerade.
An important circumstance for understanding the poem: its characters do not live, but play at life. Here everyone is wearing masks, everyone plays their role, in other words, lives an artificial life that lasts - but it only seems so - forever: “We only dream of the rooster crowing, Outside the window the Neva is smoking, The night is bottomless and lasts, lasts - St. Petersburg devilry.” . However, one of the participants in this invented, funny and creepy game will have to pay with his life for participating in it.
The game of life continues outside the walls of the house, where the masquerade action takes place: “Everyone is already in place, whoever needs it, The fifth act blows from the Summer Garden... The ghost of Tsushima hell is right there.”
The tragic farce that forms the plot basis of the “St. Petersburg Tale” belongs to its time. Just as the heroine of the poem belongs to him, “a St. Petersburg doll, an actor,” who “received friends in bed”: her alluring charm, the sensual principle embodied in her, sinful carelessness - all this attracted and had a destructive force, turned out to be the product of the frenzy so characteristic of St. Petersburg stood on the brink of destruction in 1913. This is how the features of the “pre-war, prodigal and menacing” time are revealed in the poem, a feeling of invincibility arises with which “along the legendary embankment the non-calendar - the Real Twentieth Century was approaching.”
Akhmatova has her own complicated relationship with this new century, her own scores to settle. Its approach is presented in the same tragic and farcical vein as the scenes of the “midnight Hoffmanniana”, only the main character now becomes the city on the Neva:
Christmastide was warmed by fires,
And the carriages fell off the bridges,
And the whole mourning city floated
For an unknown purpose,
Along the Neva or against the current, -
Just away from your graves.
Akhmatova does not deny love to the city with which her whole life was connected: “I am inseparable from you, My shadow on your walls, My reflection in the canals, The sound of footsteps in the Hermitage halls, Where my friend wandered with me.” But it is here, in St. Petersburg, that the flow (more precisely, the ever-accelerating flight) of time is most palpable, the most clearly perceptible is where it is moving, what it carries with it. After all, the tragedy of “Dragoon Pierrot”: “Who has little time left to live, Who only asks God for death, And who will be forgotten forever” - also belongs to time. Just as the fate of the author of the poem, full of drama, belongs to him. In both cases, the crisis character of the era reveals itself, when prosperity turns into death, and ahead - “Is it a vision of a golden age or a black crime in the formidable chaos of ancient days? "
Refusing to act as a judge, Akhmatova at the same time knows: “Retribution is coming anyway.” The death of the young poet, who could not survive the betrayal of his beloved, is only the first act of the drama that played out in the 20th century. in the vastness of history. The fourteenth and then the forty-first years revealed its different dimensions. But it is no coincidence that the memory of the author of “Poem without a Hero” in besieged Leningrad returns to what “it said goodbye to long ago.”
“A Poem without a Hero” is plotless - it has an open ending: it opens into life. Its content is determined by the events of long past years: “I’m sleeping - I’m dreaming of our youth...” But time itself is not one-dimensional for the author of the poem: “As the future matures in the past, So the past smolders in the future...” That’s why in the poem “one dreams , what is going to happen to us...”, an “incomprehensible hum” was still heard - echoes of the steps of history, into which the life of the people and their poet fit without a trace.
“Poem without a Hero” is Akhmatova’s central work, a triptych that has been subject to a wide variety of interpretations. And it seems that Akhmatova herself did not fully understand, or, in any case, preferred to hide from herself the secret meaning of this work that suddenly appeared to her.
Philologist Viktor Zhirmunsky called the poem a symbolist dream come true. And in fact, the Symbolists somehow didn’t get along very well with large forms. A symbolist novel is, as a rule, a monstrous work due to its completely inadequate mixture of reality and the most unbridled fantasy; This is exactly what, say, Sologub’s novel “Navy Chary” is like. Pasternak had to write Doctor Zhivago so that Russia would have an exemplary symbolist novel.
With the symbolist poem, the situation was also unimportant, perhaps because a truly serious time distance was needed to discern the Silver Age and comprehend it. And this is how the “Poem without a Hero” became such an understanding of the Russian Silver Age, where it is directly said: “And the silver month was bright / Cold over the silver age.”
But, of course, the meaning of the poem is much more complex and much more relevant for 1940 than an attempt to comprehend the year 1913. When Akhmatova read the first part of the triptych to Tsvetaeva in 1941, she sarcastically remarked: “You must have great courage to write about Harlequins, Columbines and Pierrots in 1941.” Meanwhile, this does not require any special courage - you just have to think about what the years 1913 and 1940 have in common. With some horror - at least, unexpectedly for ourselves - we will see that these years are pre-war, and Akhmatova’s poem could rightfully be called “Premonition of the Patriotic War.”
Akhmatova considered her poem to be quite clear: “The poem does not contain any third, seventh or twenty-ninth meanings. I will neither change it nor explain it. “Hedgehog pisah - pisah.” Its meaning is indeed quite obvious, although it could not be revealed to the people of 1940, due to the fact that their own premonition of the Patriotic War was not as clear and not as painful as Akhmatova’s.
It must be said that Russian literature did not feel anything special even in 1914. Neither Mandelstam, nor, in particular, Pasternak, with his eternally joyful worldview, could have thought that the world was on the verge of a massacre. And Akhmatova then wrote the famous prophetic poem “July 1914”:
It smells like burning. Four weeks
The dry peat in the swamps is burning.
Even the birds didn't sing today,
And the aspen no longer trembles.
“...Only they won’t divide our land
For his own amusement, the adversary:
The Virgin Mary spreads the white
Over great sorrows."
With the same acuteness, she foresaw the disaster of 1941. And not only because in 1940 the Second World War was already in full swing (although it must be said that Akhmatova was one of the very few poets who immediately responded to the Second World War with mournful poems: “When they bury an era...” and “To Londoners”; she perceived these events as facts of personal biography, since all of Europe was her home).
Akhmatova had another reason for her painfully acute premonition, which is not so easy to name out loud. Let us ask ourselves why Akhmatova alone was able to write “Requiem” in 1937-1938? Why is all Russian poetry silent at this time? Yes, because go write a poem about repression from a humiliated, crushed state, from the state of a person who is constantly being mocked.
But for Akhmatova, this lyrical pose is natural: she never seeks to be right, in this sense she is an Old Testament poet - for her, retribution has no moral reasons. “I am a lyric poet, I can roll in a ditch,” as she jokingly said in Tashkent in 1943, when they reported to her that a drunken Lugovskoy was lying in a ditch. Akhmatova could say about herself the words that amazed Tsvetaeva: “I am a bad mother”; “Husband in the grave, son in prison, / Pray for me”; “This woman is sick, this woman is alone.” Which Russian poet can say this about himself? Akhmatova can.
She lives with the original consciousness of sinfulness, and therefore crushed in 1938 is a natural position for her. This constant consciousness of sinfulness and deserved retribution always hovers over her lyrics, and it is this that allows her to feel that in 1941 there will come an absolute and universal reckoning - a worldwide reckoning for individual sins.
For example, for Akhmatova, the real personification of sinfulness was Mikhail Kuzmin, described in “Poem without a Hero.” But why, not because of homosexuality, from which, by the way, he made wonderful poems? Apparently, Akhmatova did not accept anything else about Kuzmin - his clarity, his calm joy. She did not understand how it was possible to sin so much, go through so many novels - and not be tormented by conscience for a second, write light, cheerful texts, just as easily and cheerfully surrender to new debauchery.
The first part of “Poem Without a Hero,” which tells the story of the suicide of the lyricist Vsevolod Knyazev due to unhappy love, tells the same story as Akhmatova says in an old Silver Age poem: “We are all hawkmoths here, harlots, / How sad it is for us together! » This is also a story of reckoning. According to Gumilyov’s recollections, Akhmatova tormented him every morning with a conversation about never-been infidelities, telling him: “Nikola, again this night I dreamed that I was unfaithful to you,” which he then mockingly told Irina Odoevtseva about. And for Akhmatova, with her painful constant consciousness of her own guilt, Vsevolod Knyazev is also the personification of that very private sin, for which everyone will soon have to pay.
The horror of the sinfulness of the Silver Age is not only that everyone has affairs with everyone. Not only that Glebova-Sudeikina - “Confusion-Psyche” - easily and naturally cheats on her husband. Not only that Pallada Bogdanova-Belskaya, the most famous St. Petersburg libertine, becomes the muse of all salons and the heroine of all poets. The horror is that the Silver Age is a continuous game, it is a constant carnival in which there is nothing serious. And for this game comes the most serious and tragic reckoning.
“A Poem Without a Hero” is usually considered in the same context as Akhmatova’s poems of the Silver Age, but this is not entirely true: it must be considered together with other pre-war works of her great peers, such as Pasternak and Mandelstam. At this time, Mandelstam wrote the oratorio “Poems about the Unknown Soldier,” full of the same mysterious premonitions. What these things have in common is not only their incomprehensibility, not only their peculiar hallucinatory nature, but the fact that they are imbued with a premonition of enormous sacrifices. Akhmatova writes:
How the future matures in the past,
So in the future the past smolders -
A terrible festival of dead leaves.
And here is Mandelstam:
Ash clarity, sycamore vigilance
A little red rushes to her house.
Of all the decodings of this metaphor, the truest one seems to me to be this: these are just leaves falling to the ground in the same way as millions of lives, millions of corpses dissolve in the ground.
In this context lies the largely unexplained Pasternak cycle of 1940, the so-called Peredelkinsky cycle. There is the famous poem “Waltz with Devilry,” which, like “Poem without a Hero,” describes a merry dance with ominous overtones:
The fluttering of blouses, the singing of doors,
The roar of toddlers, the laughter of mothers.
Dates, books, games, nougat,
Needles, tricks, jumps, runs.
Why, in 1940, did two poets, for whom both substantive and formal parallels are very rare, suddenly simultaneously turn to the theme of the New Year's sinister carnival? This, I think, reflects the terrible and festive atmosphere of the Soviet 1940, unusually similar to the atmosphere of the pre-war 1913. Everyone participates in the same carnival, everyone wears masks, and everyone understands that this carnival is doomed, that soon they will have to pay for this universal lie and fun.
In Bulgakov, who at the same time was writing the final version of The Master and Margarita, the theme of a terrible holiday, a demonic carnival, is constantly present. Everyone is aware of the terror and celebrates with triple strength, because the spectacle of universal death terribly sets up this holiday. Like Akhmatova and Pasternak, the main theme here is the theater of terror, the theatricality of violence.
And according to Akhmatova, the price to pay, as in 1913, is a military catastrophe. It’s logical to ask: what did Knyazev and Glebova-Sudeikina do that was so terrible? Why is the whole world so cruelly punished for ordinary adultery, for ordinary bisexuality, for ordinary love play? But the main idea of “Poem without a Hero” is that sin is always private, but retribution is universal: for many small private sins there is a retribution that is incommensurate with the sin.
The general sinfulness of 1940, when everyone was dancing and deliberately did not notice the death, this terrible lining, will result in retribution on a planetary scale. It is no coincidence that the second part of the poem, which already brings us close to the events of the war, is called “Tails”, that is, the shell, the reverse, the underside of the festival, its terrible underground, the terrible retribution for the universal lie.
The very structure of “Poem without a Hero” suggests a triptych in a religious sense, and therefore about redemption. In the first part of the triptych, in a historical excursion, a terrible demonic dance of 1913 is depicted. In the second part, the theme of gloomy anticipation of retribution arises. And in the third part, written in Tashkent, the theme of redemption arises, because the war of 1941-1945 is such a feat and a revival of the national spirit that atones for the terrible sin of the general lies of the 1930s. In this part of the poem the hero appears:
Dry eyes downcast
And wringing hands, Russia
Before me she walked to the east.
The hero is Russia, which has gone through the purifying flame.
There are many interpretations of the title “Poems without a Hero.” Lev Losev believed that PbG is an encrypted name for St. Petersburg, which is the main character. You can see a hint that the hero of the poem is invisible, a mysterious ghost. “Since childhood, I was afraid of mummers,” because someone invisible was among the mummers. But it seems to me that the meaning of the name is very simple. “A Poem without a Hero” is a poem of a non-heroic time, a poem of a time in which there is no hero, but only a terrible carnival of mummers.
And the hero, with his appearance, atones for this tragedy. Appearing in the third part of the poem, the Russian people become the hero that time lacks. This terror, this terrible theater, this neuroticization of society cannot be redeemed by anything other than a heroic deed, except the appearance of a hero.
And that is why “Poem without a Hero,” whose heroine is on the other side of hell, still has such an optimistic sound on the whole. The terrible theatrical ghost carnival passed, and the country saw its own face.
Anna Akhmatova created her key work, “Poem without a Hero,” over the course of two decades. The large time period allowed the poetess to put all her thoughts, experiences, and reflections into the poem, summing up her entire creative path. The main themes of the poem were time and memory - concepts on which Akhmatova strung the poetic lines, creating a monumental, epic canvas in which motifs of the past and present, elements of home life close to the poetess, phantasmagoric images, legends and reality are intertwined in a bizarre composition.
Akhmatova, who began her poetic journey in the era of the “Silver Age” of Russian culture, turns to the times of her youth, to that period in the history of Russia, the charm of which we have lost forever.
The first part of the poem, entitled “Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen,” tells us the tragic story of a dragoon cornet who commits suicide because of unhappy love.
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The basis of the plot was a real incident that happened almost before Akhmatova’s eyes, but in fact, the real background becomes only a convenient excuse to pull out a whole carnival of scary and cute ghosts from the oblivion of past years. The story of the poor dragoon became a magnificent illustration of the entire era. The author saw in this case all the nuances of that distant past, which, as if with a spotlight, was highlighted by the suicide of the dragoon. Tragedy, farce, comedy, mysticism - such an elusive flair hovered in the atmosphere of the past. The author suggests that it was the frivolity of the era that became the fatal reason for its downfall.
The poetess, who lives in the “fateful forties,” turns to her memories, in which the past lost era comes to life. In the present, she has many tragic events behind her, the arrest of her husband and son, the inability to publish, the besieged Leningrad. In her introduction, Akhmatova especially notes her position in relation to the memory of past years:
From the year forty,
I look at everything as if from a tower.
It's like I'm saying goodbye again
With what I said goodbye to long ago,
As if she crossed herself
And I go under the dark arches.
Akhmatova, with the help of the magic of poetic words, returns to 1913 and calls readers along with her during these years, which she calls the last year of peace. The poetess makes an attempt to recreate the past, which she witnessed and became a judge:
I forgot your lessons
Evil talkers and false prophets!
The tragedy of the narrative is enhanced by the composition of the poem, when the author’s gaze turns to bygone times many years later. It is difficult for the author to come to terms with the fact that the heroes of her youth have become shadows of the past; she asks in despair:
How could this happen?
That I'm the only one alive?
The poem has a clear manifestation of the pathos of an imminent catastrophe. The death of the young poet, who could not survive the betrayal of his beloved, is only the first act of the drama that played out in the 20th century. in the vastness of history. The fourteenth and then the forty-first years revealed its different dimensions. But it is no coincidence that the memory of the author of “Poem without a Hero” in besieged Leningrad returns to what “it said goodbye to long ago.” The tragic intonation of the theme is set off by a whole gallery of masquerade images that came from the space of world classical literature, which are shown as casts from the face of the era. In the center of the lyrical plot is a young dragoon unhappy in love and an actress, whose story helps to raise the level of necessary poetic intensity to a broad epic canvas, covering a very clearly defined period of history. The authenticity and verisimilitude of the picture are emphasized by the presence of key historical images: Blok’s appearance:
That's him in a crowded room
Sent that black rose in a glass...
Like the echo of mountain thunder,
Our glory and triumph!..
In addition, a significant historical parallel can also be traced in the poem - the image of St. Petersburg. It is no coincidence that the first part of the poem received the subtitle “The Petersburg Tale.” The image of the great city, which permeates parts of the poem, plays the role of a connecting element between the past and the present. In the poem, Petersburg is shown in line with the classical plots of Russian literature with Gogol's grotesqueness, Dostoevsky's pangs of conscience. St. Petersburg becomes a silent witness to human dramas and the keeper of something elusive, but very significant, which has not disappeared during the hard times. St. Petersburg has become a symbol of memory of a lost era, which carries echoes of the past leading to the present.
The motif of historical memory has always been an important element in Akhmatova’s work; in “Poem without a Hero” it reached its highest insight:
How the future matures in the past,
So in the future the past smolders -
Am I more to blame than others?
This introduces into the poem a bright and sad motif of conscience, which also carries an awareness of the guilt of each person for the tragedies that have occurred. Memory, time and conscience merge into a single whole, forming the central images of the work. The key images are the Author, a generalized image of a person who is responsible for the fate of not only the people, but also all of humanity, and the City, which acts as an inspired image of the many-sided world, a symbol of its inviolability, the keeper of time and memory of past eras. With the help of these two images, the complex structure of the multifaceted and multifaceted poem finds a solid basis.
The flow of the river of time takes the reader to 1941. Despite the fact that all the main life losses are a thing of the distant past, the world of youth and excitement, love and passion has dissolved, but in the “Epilogue” the author again experiences sadness, saying goodbye to the great City. The poetess leaves St. Petersburg when the city is shrouded in a terrible blockade plague, she mourns, because together with him she says goodbye to an entire era of her life, which forever left a memory on its streets.
One of Akhmatova’s most fundamental creations is the Poem without a Hero, which covers various periods of the poetess’s life and tells about the fate of Akhmatova herself, who survived her creative youth in St. Petersburg, the besieged city and many adversities.
In the first part, the reader observes nostalgia and a journey into bygone eras. Akhmatova sees how “deliriums” and bursts of some kind of conversation “resurrect”; she meets “guests” who appear in masks and represent shadows of the previous time.
Most likely, the poetess here seems to be traveling along the waves of memory and describing a situation when a person plunges deeply into images, remembers people with whom he communicated a long time ago and some of whom can no longer be seen on this earth. Therefore, the action takes on the features of a kind of carnival and phantasmagoria. This part ends with the call of a hero who is absent from the poem.
The theme of the presence/absence of the hero is continued by the second part, which describes communication with the editor, who is the only voice of reason in the entire poem and, as it were, returns the reader to the rational world. He asks how there can be a poem without a hero and Akhmatov, it would seem that he begins some kind of reasonable explanation, but then again it seems to return to a dream or some kind of dreams that are far from reality. And here the poetess’s thoughts lead her towards memories not of her own biography and 1913, but towards discussions about culture in general and previous eras.
In the final part, the poetess describes the evacuation from the city, the destroyed country and the hardships of the war. Here the main theme becomes the homeland, the native country, with which the poetess also experienced all sorts of troubles. At the same time, here the poetess talks about the future time, but does not see prospects or anything worthy there; for the most part, Akhmatova’s appeal is directed to past eras, she “came with a distant echo” and wanted to hear such an echo precisely from previous times and her memories.
Of course, one should speculate about who the hero is in this poem and whether there really can be a poem without a hero at all. In fact, the hero is present here to some extent; he can be his homeland, St. Petersburg, and Akhmatova herself. However, if we somehow generalize and try to look at the situation more globally, then the hero of this poem is undoubtedly the stream of consciousness that passes through people, times and countries.
Analysis of the poem Poem without a hero according to plan
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